With the development of network technologies and with the distribution of home network systems, a variety of home network devices are used at home. Further, as the proliferation of the Internet increases, many homes use various types of services that access the Internet. The use of various types of services makes it impossible to easily predict when and how the home network devices are connected with equipments of service providers on the Internet, and when and how each service provider provides service. Therefore, in order to cope with this situation, a home gateway serving to connect the home network devices to the external network must be turned on 24 hours a day.
Due to this situation, although little power is used for the home gateway, the home network device, such as the home gateway, accounts for an increasing proportion of the power consumption of each home as the distributed number thereof is increased. Thus, the power consumption thereof is in no way negligible, nationally or internationally. Further, the national or international importance of saving energy is rising in view of high oil prices and environmental pollution. As such, technology for an energy-aware home gateway capable of providing an automatic power saving function is required.
Energy-aware technology that is applied to the fields of conventional home network devices and telecommunication technologies is mainly focused on telecommunications appliances such as monitors, personal computers, mobile phones, and the like. The conventional technologies are integrated into, particularly, an advanced configuration and power interface (ACPI) industry standard for the field of the personal computers. As the most representative example thereof, when there is no input from a user, i.e. an event initiated by the user such as keyboard input or mouse input, power for a corresponding appliance is designed to be interrupted.
Since these energy-aware technologies are restricted to use of each of independent devices, they defy being applied to home network devices, including the home gateway, to which various network appliances are connected.